Jade questions whether hermitic living is possible in an era of constant communication and increased housing costs as she finds herself financially unstable and itinerant.

In Hermit you’re balancing two very different things: the abusive relationship you were in, with this need to be solitary, although it feels essential to our understanding of the present day to know where you’d come from. So I was very careful when it came to writing about people who are a part of the story but weren’t the main thread of the story. Left on her own at a Barn on the Exmoor hills, I could feel her badly dented confidence in herself start to grow and bloom over time as she learnt to be more self-sufficient, in different ways, alone in nature.She cleans holiday homes in the town she grew up in, all the while writing and longing to escape everything for a life is solitude and nature. As Jade transforms through this experience, becoming one with the landscape that surrounds her, we as reader find ourselves transforming alongside her.

I really felt a connection with Saint Endelienta who came over from Wales and stopped off in Lundy, and loved the island so much she built her chapel before going off with her siblings to convert the unruly population of Devon and Cornwall.As the former, I found it rather odd but, as the latter, there were lots of interesting thoughts and ideas about isolation. The story of her breaking out of that relationship, taking time to be alone and learning to love and trust herself/others again was the main story arc. It's a forest glade of a book: a hidden shore; a moorland escarpment where the voices you hear are the only ones that truly matter. Highly recommended for anyone interested in exploring their own experiences of isolation; and for lovers of wildlife and nature.

Most people have been through some kind of trauma, or lived through shame and humiliation, and they are such isolating feelings. This distinctive , alluring memoir, reminiscent of The Outrun by Amy Liptrot, relates how Fitton slowly learns to live alone and celebrate solitude in the natural world. You’re trying to be a vessel through which you can transcribe and put into words the experience of being there and what that might have felt like for other people. By the end, I still felt she hadn’t quite found what she was after – although from where she started, she was in a much better place.I feel hermit tendencies myself and it was wonderful to listen to a memoir of someone who has a lived experience of this life and ruminated on the magic of it- as well as it often being a self protective act. But, in reality, she is rarely unconnected with humans on any level, lives with either a boyfriend or husband for much of the book and only once withdraws herself from society on her own for any length of time and that has much to do with a natural reaction to recovering from the effects of trauma.